ETHICAL ANALYSES OF HRM / TUTORIALOUTLET DOT COM ETHICAL ANALYSES OF HRM / TUTORIALOUTLET DOT COM | Page 4

2 It should be noted that the term normative is used in this article in
the philosophical sense to mean how things should or ought to be
(which things are good or bad, which actions are right or wrong)
rather than the lay usage to mean establishing or deriving from a
standard (as a synonym of ‘‘universal’’) as appears in much HRM
literature (see, for example, Thompson 2011, p. 358). 123 356 to
achieve social legitimacy by being seen as ethical, are on
the rise and rise.
By developing a framework to analyse various perspectives, and their
contrasting but related approaches to ethical
issues in HRM, this study also responds to Janssens and
Steyaert’s (2009) plea for reflexivity ‘‘to make the plurality
of HRM visible by pointing out various paradigmatic, theoretical and
empirical communities of practice that partly
are connected, partly overlap and partly avoid each other’’
(p. 152). The objective of undertaking such reflexivity is ‘‘to
use tensions among different perspectives to expose and
connect different assumptions and to open up new ways of
thinking’’ (p. 152) about ethical issues in HRM.